Sunderland's running costs are 'scary' and must be reduced, says Stewart Donald


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We don't have an owner who is going to invest 50m of his own money into the club. So then we need to match our outgoings to our incomings. If that means we have to spend 5 years in the Championship then so be it. It's been 10 years of not being able to sustain our spending and so people shouldn't be surprised if it takes an equal amount of time to "fix it"

But you’ve ignored my points about the losses sustained on a continual basis by L1 clubs....and it’s even worse in the Championship. Eventually we will have a sizeable debt again (Championship clubs total was around £1billion at the last count)....UNLESS we successfully buy and sell players. There’s no future in journeymen....cut back as much as you like and you’ll still lose money every season...that’s a fact.
 
I agree with all of that marra. My point was that there's folk who were gunning for him last time redundancies were announced, some now seem to be saying they need to happen. It's amazing what a change of owner does. For what it's worth I also feel it needs to happen. I've been through this process myself, both by having my job at risk and carrying out cost cutting and consultations. It's not nice, but most people recover pretty quickly. Infact some are glad to go. The contrast in views from last year though from some people is slightly hypocritical.

Staff Redundancies at SAFC

I think it helps that we saw redundancies at board level with 6 and 7 figure salaries going and bring replaced with a leaner department. Did Bain do similar or did he add mates from Rangers to the wage bill to do is job for him and milk the cash cow with him?

Redundancy is easier to accept of it's from top to bottom rather than middle to bottom.
 
Bain still has his apologists then..fair enough...it's all about opinions.... but can anyone explain what exactly was the remit of the Director of Change.?
and what exactly did they change,that benefitted SAFC.
 
That sort of response makes you sound like a spoilt child though, there is a difference between Newcastle levels of "we deserve to be playing champions league football" and understanding you have to walk before you can run and we may need to knock half the house down before we build it back up again, which isn't going to be 1-2 years of work.

I agree with you, but slashing costs and re-evaluating ourselves in terms of league 2 clubs isn't knocking half the house down. It's lunacy. It's the same strategy that has seen us sink like a brick. We have a 48k stadium and a category 1 academy. The best means to getting out of league one isn't to sack all the staff, close them, and then play the same game as Shrewsbury. We need to take advantage of what we have, not bemoan it's existence.
 
It's just a question of getting it lean. We will no doubt be paying people in Africa and God knows where.

Some of it is unavoidable though. Have an AoL and you need a boat load of AoL support staff that league 1 teams don't need or have.

I think the top and bottom of it is that it's a two pronged approach. Attack the bloat and get out of league 1 asap.

The academy has to be our number one priority long term.
 
I think it helps that we saw redundancies at board level with 6 and 7 figure salaries going and bring replaced with a leaner department. Did Bain do similar or did he add mates from Rangers to the wage bill to do is job for him and milk the cash cow with him?

Redundancy is easier to accept of it's from top to bottom rather than middle to bottom.
Fair comment marra.
 
But you’ve ignored my points about the losses sustained on a continual basis by L1 clubs....and it’s even worse in the Championship. Eventually we will have a sizeable debt again (Championship clubs total was around £1billion at the last count)....UNLESS we successfully buy and sell players. There’s no future in journeymen....cut back as much as you like and you’ll still lose money every season...that’s a fact.
At no point am I going to disagree with you that you need good players to be a good team? Of course we don't need journeymen or league 1 plodders or has-beens as that is literally the sort of thing that has caused all of this debt.

It also isn't a secret that very few clubs are able to make a profit yet a good number still manage to yo-yo their finances so they aren't in the situations of not being sustainable in 2 seasons time.

The entire reason to keep the AoL going is that it gives us the chance to have a good setup of developing players that'll cost us less and we can sell on for a profit and everyone is going to want Jack Ross to be given money to buy decent Championship level players to get us out of league 1 and not need to rebuild once we are in that league all over again.

None of that gets in the way of trimming the rest of the club down to a manageable size. They aren't mutually exclusive. If anything, trimming the club down on the non-playing side gives the manager more money to put into the players.
 
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One non contributing person a massive part of that and needs to be dealt with

He says the running costs are scary before players wages are taken into account. So whilst Rodwell needs to go, he isn’t even part of that.

All this makes me think of that trip to New York under Moyes. Absolutely f***ing barmy that the club were haemorrhaging money and they forked out for an all inclusive trip to New York for a bike ride.
 
He must have been fully aware of all costs when he completed due diligence, it is how he now manages it that will be the difference between him and Short.

Let us hope he makes the right calls from the off, his business expertise is required along with that of his selected team.

All of this is based on before he started at the club
 
I think one of the main problems with women's football is that, although many of us talk about it in a positive light (whatever motivates that), when it comes to the crunch the harsh reality is that no one in this country is interested in it. Liverpool, for example, is one of only five professional women's teams. Their average home crowd since (I think) 2016 is 663. When Sunderland were in the top flight their home average in 2016 was (I think) around the 700 mark. I read somewhere (can't remember where!) in the last week or so that it's now 200 and odd. The demand doesn't appear to be there. It's then difficult to justify the relatively high outlay. If you're Man Citeh & you have access to huge funds then you can afford to run parts of the club at a loss, for whatever reason you deem fit, but that's not our situation at all.
 
Fair comment marra.

It's shit that normal working class people are losing their jobs, we all know what that could bring for them. However it sounds like the club had been over burdened with staff for a long time, again I'll day it Short was so hands off he probably had no idea and just saw the negative column on a balance sheet.

The fact that Bain was allowed to add high level staff despite his job being cost cutting is a joke, not to mention him being one of the highest paid footy CEO's in the country.
 
We have a lot more non-playing staff working for the club than a lot of Premier League clubs have as has been stated. It's barmy to run a club on League One money irrespective of gate receipts like that, it's barmy to runs Championship club like that as well. Christ, it's pointless running a top flight club like that. Everything at the club needs to run efficiently instead of us spending money hand over fist on things we simply don't need

Who are these non-playing staff that keeps getting talked about though? Are there really more ticket staff, club shop staff, burger kiosk staff etc than anywhere else?
 
I agree with you, but slashing costs and re-evaluating ourselves in terms of league 2 clubs isn't knocking half the house down. It's lunacy. It's the same strategy that has seen us sink like a brick. We have a 48k stadium and a category 1 academy. The best means to getting out of league one isn't to sack all the staff, close them, and then play the same game as Shrewsbury. We need to take advantage of what we have, not bemoan it's existence.
It's lunacy not to look at all costs. Why do we need three times as many non-playing staff as WBA, almost three times as many as Southampton, over can twice as many as them up the road etc? This is in comparison to premier league clubs. Never mind league one clubs.

If you compare our numbers of employees with PL clubs, we have more than most clubs outside the top 6. Our last accounts showed 293 non-playing staff; Newcastle have 127, Stoke 224, West Brom 89, Southampton 110. The better question is why do we have so many in the first place, and is one that Donald and Methven have probably asked.

Who are these non-playing staff that keeps getting talked about though? Are there really more ticket staff, club shop staff, burger kiosk staff etc than anywhere else?

These figures don't even include non playing match day staff.
 
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I think one of the main problems with women's football is that, although many of us talk about it in a positive light (whatever motivates that), when it comes to the crunch the harsh reality is that no one in this country is interested in it. Liverpool, for example, is one of only five professional women's teams. Their average home crowd since (I think) 2016 is 663. When Sunderland were in the top flight their home average in 2016 was (I think) around the 700 mark. I read somewhere (can't remember where!) in the last week or so that it's now 200 and odd. The demand doesn't appear to be there. It's then difficult to justify the relatively high outlay. If you're Man Citeh & you have access to huge funds then you can afford to run parts of the club at a loss, for whatever reason you deem fit, but that's not our situation at all.
If you look at womens sport generally you'll find it's attached to men's sports see tennis, athletics etc it's all part of the same ticket on the same day.

That's what I'd look to do of it was me, women can play on the same day as the men, reduce the price of a pint and make it the same ticket for the full day, I'd be willing to bet you'd get 1000 people who'd stay to watch the lasses if they came on after the men's team.
 
It's shit that normal working class people are losing their jobs, we all know what that could bring for them. However it sounds like the club had been over burdened with staff for a long time, again I'll day it Short was so hands off he probably had no idea and just saw the negative column on a balance sheet.

The fact that Bain was allowed to add high level staff despite his job being cost cutting is a joke, not to mention him being one of the highest paid footy CEO's in the country.
I think you've nailed it mate with the Short been hands off comment. The biggest thing that has become even more obvious this last week is just how distant he was from the club. Any owner with a vested interest in the business questions those he's employed. The lunatics were certainly running the asylum.
 
Ok....are you happy to accept us running the club as a sustainable L1 club?

I’m sure the answer that is no, you want to exit L1 asap. Right let’s look at the accounts (published) for the last two teams to do that...Sheff Utd and Millwall. Sheff Utd made a loss of £5.7m...and that’s after £8.6m the previous season. Millwall made a loss of £5.8m and £7.1m the season before.

It’s complete pie in the sky thinking to believe we can be run as a self sustaining club and get out of L1...unless L2 is the aim.

We can cut costs and move players on but if Sheff Utd make hefty losses on 20k+ average gates people have to realise it’s not as simple as sacking everyone.

Edit....oops, forgot Bolton’s £12m loss there.

Everything flows from the team you duck egg....

Build it and they will come.....We have a Fookin budget these boys know what they are doing.....
 
If you look at womens sport generally you'll find it's attached to men's sports see tennis, athletics etc it's all part of the same ticket on the same day.

That's what I'd look to do of it was me, women can play on the same day as the men, reduce the price of a pint and make it the same ticket for the full day, I'd be willing to bet you'd get 1000 people who'd stay to watch the lasses if they came on after the men's team.
Canny idea marra. Ow, Donald la, mack him chargehand!
 
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